The Maple Grid Computing Toolbox enables you to run Maple computations in parallel, taking advantage of all your hardware resources, cutting down on processing time, and enabling applications that were not possible before.

The Maple Grid Computing Toolbox allows you to deploy your parallel programs to large-scale compute clusters and supercomputers, taking full advantage of all available processing power to tackle very large problems. This allows you to handle problems that are not tractable on a single machine because of memory limitations or because it would simply take too long.

The Grid Computing Toolbox is very easy to set up. It can connect directly into your existing Windows® HPC Server cluster without the need to set up services on each node. You can also start a server process on each computer on a network and the grid will self-assemble as each node automatically detects the other nodes that are present. The Grid Computing Toolbox also integrates into existing job scheduling systems such as PBS.

Maple includes the ability to easily set up multi-process computations on a single computer. The Maple Grid Computing Toolbox extends this power to multi-machine or cluster parallelism. The two versions are fully compatible, so that an algorithm can be created and fully tested using the local implementation inside Maple, and then deployed to the full cluster using the toolbox, without changes to the algorithm.

In order to perform distributed computations, the Grid Computing Toolbox offers a variety of tools:

Standard MPI message passing on Windows HPC Server, for efficient communication and integration with tools that support this protocol.

MPI message passing on Linux using the MPICH2 protocol, a high performance implementation of the MPI standard distributed by Argonne National Laboratory.

An MPI-like message passing API, which is available on all platforms. This API is part of the Grid Computing Toolbox, so when using this protocol, no special drivers or other tools need to be installed on the computers in the grid. In addition to simplifying the setup of the grid, this protocol is also ideal for parallel computing on a single computer and computations across heterogeneous networks.

A set of high-level commands in Maple for defining parallel computations.